Читать книгу The Harim and the Purdah: Studies of Oriental Women онлайн

56 страница из 58

One cannot judge of the life of the average Egyptian woman by living only in Cairo, where the note of modernism has sounded with such call as to reach even the inner rooms of the harim, but in the smaller towns of Egypt one sees the real Egyptian life, untouched by the customs of alien lands.

CHILDREN ON THE NILE.

To face p. ssss1.

I visited in a home on the banks of the Nile and watched with interested eyes the life around me: saw the mother attend to her household duties in the morning, giving the servants directions for the day’s work, measuring and weighing out the stores to the cook, and taking his accounts as he came from the market-place with the day’s provisions. An old blind woman came in the morning to give the children their lesson in the Koran. She would start a surah, then the children would repeat the remaining verses in a sing-song voice, the slightest break in the intonation calling forth a rebuke from the leader, whose nodding head kept time to the chant. At nine o’clock the older children took their books under their arms and started for the village school, in the same noisy manner as do our children at home. I watched the fellaheen as they lifted the water from the river to irrigate the thirsty fields, and saw the black-robed women filling their water-jars and placing them upon their heads with a beautiful sweeping gesture, walk gracefully away to their little mud huts that could scarcely be distinguished from the sands around them.